Anthony Marra’s debut aims to look into the horrors of Chechnya (Picture: Iandodds.co.uk)

The ex-Soviet republic of Chechnya made headlines around the world last month when it emerged that the Boston bombing suspects were the sons of refugees from the breakaway state, in perpetual and bloody conflict with its former rulers in Moscow since 1994.

Now, with uncanny timing, comes a US debut already hailed as essential reading for anyone wishing to understand what may lie behind the Boston attacks.

Anthony Marra was inspired to write it after returning from a visit to Chechnya and finding no fiction in English about the wars there. His story – full of horror, heartbreak and coincidence – begins with a night raid on a snowy Chechen village as Putin’s troops abduct the father of an eight-year-old girl as a result of an ill-founded tip from local informant Ramzan (named, you suspect, after Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya’s pro-Putin head of state).

The girl finds shelter in a hospital run by a British-educated surgeon mourning her own loss – a sister who fell victim to sex trafficking before carrying out the murder that set the plot of the novel in train.

Marra tells a tale of ordinary Chechens caught in the crossfire between Moscow and the militants but he lays it on a bit too thick. The novel stakes too much on manipulating our emotions by telling us things the characters aren’t able to know.

In one instance, Ramzan’s father, ­Khassan, sends a letter to the family of a Russian soldier, but Khassan never finds out that the letter didn’t reach its destination before the ­soldier died. It’s a bogus and ex­ploitative technique. You question Marra’s right to lord it over the ­characters in this way.

He doesn’t flinch from describing Russian torture – someone is raped with a live eel – but his December 2004 dateline makes it odd that he avoids Chechen militancy (2004 was the year of the Beslan school siege as well as the assassination of Chechnya’s pro-Moscow president). The problem isn’t balance so much as a sense that Marra fears we’d lose sympathy if his portrait of the conflict took a wider angle.

He’s writing mainly for readers in the US, where the announcement of a global War On Terror gave some very nasty regimes the perfect cover story for their own brutally repressive domestic agendas.Perhaps that realisation explains some ecstatic praise Stateside but no author’s subject can exist independently from his decisions about how to approach it.

Marra is tipped as a name to watch but his zeal for pathos here turns valuable ingredients into a smug and ultimately fraudulent confection.